Huainanzi

The compilation closes with a chapter summarising every chapter before it and stating why each was included and how the whole fits together. That is rare in early Chinese literature and it changes how the book should be read: this is not an anthology that accumulated, it is a work designed as a complete curriculum, and the design is on the record. The claim is that a ruler who has understood the whole will need nothing else, because the book covers the pattern of heaven, the shape of earth, the seasons, the conduct of the self, military affairs and the arts of rule.

The chapters were written by a group of scholars gathered at the court of Huainan, working to a plan rather than each pursuing a subject, and the voice is consequently more consistent than a court anthology would be. Its intellectual position is the synthesis usually called Huang-Lao, which takes the Daoist account of the way as its ground and builds a practical statecraft on it, absorbing correlative cosmology and the five phases as the mechanism linking the ruler's conduct to the working of the world. The book is the fullest surviving statement of a position that was influential at the start of the Han and lost afterwards.

The book was presented to the young emperor by Liu An, king of Huainan and a member of the imperial house, and the presentation was a political act as well as a literary one: it offered the throne a complete theory of government from a regional king with a claim to intellectual authority. Within two decades Liu An was accused of plotting rebellion and died by his own hand, his court was broken up and his kingdom abolished. The intellectual climate moved against the book as well.

The court settled on a Confucian orthodoxy with its own canon and its own examination of officials, and the syncretic position this work represents ceased to be a live option at the centre. The text survived, but as a compendium to be quarried rather than a programme to be followed. That quarrying is how most readers meet it. It preserves early versions of stories that are now the standard forms of Chinese myth, among them the goddess who repairs the broken sky and the archer who shoots down the excess suns, and it is a principal source for early Chinese astronomy, calendrics and correlative thought. The atlas records it as a coherent argument first and a storehouse second, because the second is how it is usually cited and the first is what it was for.